Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
October 13, 2009
Link
8.6

 











"Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s." Those words, when James Murphy over-enunciated them on what's still arguably the decade's best piece of music-as-music-criticism-- LCD Soundsystem's 2002 debut single, "Losing My Edge"-- had the decisive feel of a gauntlet being thrown down. One 1980s baby struck back with a Nintendo Power Glove. Just a guess: Probably not what Murphy had in mind.

Of course, cheaply copied reminiscences of a blurrily imagined decade are basically their own genre now, cloudy and proud. The sound has many names, but none of them seem to fit just right. Dream-beat, chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, even hipster-gogic pop-- all are imperfect phrases for describing a psychedelic music that's generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus. Washed Out. Memory Tapes. Ducktails. Ah-woo-ooh.

For Alan Palomo, reflecting on the music of the Reagan era has a personal component. The Texas-reared Mexico native's dad, Jorge, was a bit of a Spanish-language pop star in the late 1970s and early 80s. The analog electronics of that bygone period echo throughout the younger Palomo's increasingly promising previous recordings, whether with former band Ghosthustler (he wore the Power Glove in the video for their "Parking Lot Nights") or, more recently, on VEGA's Well Known Pleasures EP. Finally, working with Brooklyn-based visual collaborator Alicia Scardetta as Neon Indian, Palomo has brought all the best of 2009's summer sounds-- bedroom production, borrowed nostalgia, unresolved sadness, deceptively agile popcraft-- together on a single album.

Whatever they owe to the past, the memories on Psychic Chasms are Palomo's and ours. Soft vocals recalling You Made Me Realise-era Kevin Shields. Italo-disco synth arpeggios. Hall & Oates drum sounds. Divebombing video-game effects. Brittle guitar distortion. Manipulated tapes that bend the notes the way Shields' "glide guitar" did, the way bluesmen's fret fingers did. Field recordings of birds. Oohing and ahhing backing vocals. And samples, on at least two songs, of the elder Palomo, whose electro-rock approach was quite similar. All combine on eight or nine unforgettable songs and a few tantalizingly brief interludes, indelibly capturing the glamor and bleary malaise of being young and horny as an empire devours itself.

Like a low-rent Daft Punk, Palomo takes what 1990s rock fans probably would've considered cheesy-- LinnDrum and Oberheim rhythms, Chromeo-plated electro-funk Korg riffs, processed party-vocal samples-- and not only makes them part of a distinct artistic vision, but also keeps them fun. Quick opener "(AM)" is rife with detail, as an indecipherable tenor floats over a mock-dramatic drum fill and 8-bit star cruisers do battle against twinkling fairy dust. Another sub-minute interstitial track, "(If I Knew, I'd Tell You)", keeps its secrets to itself, letting multiple melodic synth lines hint at a gulf-sized pool of melancholy over a tape-altered rhythm track. "Laughing Gas", at slightly more than a lyric-less minute and a half, is the one that ruins my attempted distinction between songs and interludes, with bongo drums, robot vocal samples, and euphoric giggles straight out of those Air France kids' dreams. The cumulative result is a meltdown-deadened but deliriously inventive perspective on pop.

"I really hope the medium by which someone writes a song isn't the only thing the song has going for it," Palomo told our own Ryan Dombal in a recent interview. With Psychic Chasms, Palomo doesn't need to worry. "Deadbeat Summer" and "Should Have Taken Acid With You" are two views of the same non-endless season-- one mind-expandingly lazy and the other too lazy for mind expansion, both undeniably catchy, both earning doctorates in The Graduate school of coming-of-age ennui. The Italo-alluding title track, the New Order-throbbing "Local Joke", and the visceral funk alarums of "Ephemeral Artery" are beautiful bummers, tracks with lyrics the faithful are sure to puzzle out the way kids used to with the first couple of Weezer CDs. "Living this way held by a single strand/ But you wouldn't understand," worries "6669 (I Don't Know If You Know)", which comes back, refracted again, as 56-second finale "7000 (Reprise)". If you want to destroy his sweater, hold this thread as he walks away.

Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs. After barely a half hour, the whole thing is over, but there's enough going on in the layered electronics and enigmatic longing to make this one of the year's most replayable albums. Consider "Terminally Chill", which has more vocal and instrumental hooks than the average Top 40 song, but also the immediately recognizable stamp of an impressive young talent. Palomo's gear was stolen last month while on tour with VEGA, but a recent FADER video suggests he could launch a decently credible alternate "career" as an acoustic troubadour doing Mexican traditional songs. For various mundane personal reasons, this cassette-focused album is one of the actual CDs I've listened to most since I actually listened to CDs. A new generation's borrowed nostalgia? High time.

Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

Video / Album Review
ABC News
Link
Oct. 12, 2009

Múm - Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 29, 2009
Link
3.9

 

Múm's fifth album starts off kind of like Tim Hardin's 1966 hit for Bobby Darin, "If I Were a Carpenter". Except instead of imagining themselves as Joe the Woodworker (and you as a lady), the Icelandic collective are singing about-- well, the title's "If I Were a Fish". It'd almost definitely be making a geyser out of a lyrical plankton-fart to observe that the world's most famous carpenter also happened to be the world's most famous recruiter of fishermen. Shit, just a few lines later, Múm are a bumblebee, drowning in "your soggy eyeballs," which, hmm.

But uhh, few bands outside 1980s bedsit-indie circles would be better suited to rep the Beatitudes' "blessed are the meek" rap than Múm. That's as true as ever on Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know. Already one transitional LP (2007's Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy) removed from singer Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir's departure to go make backwards recordings with Avey Tare, Múm remain pretty obsessed with the kind of childlike innocence that drove people nuts about Valtýsdóttir's impish persona, let alone her voice. Artists like Japan's Lullatone and Tenniscoats have used similar naïve-folk ramshackle wispiness toward their own ambitious, endearing ends, tickling and prodding cuteness toward its avant-garde extremes.

Múm's latest can be childish, but it isn't cute, and despite some (relatively) inventive arrangements, this time it's a bit of a slog on a purely musical level. Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know still melds electronic and organic elements, as the band have been doing since their early-millennium breakthrough, cramming in male-female harmonies, lo-fi percussion, rhapsodically blue strings, prepared piano, hammered dulcimer, marimbas, ukuleles, and even a parakeet alongside guitars and synths. Billed as a response to the recent unrest in Múm's native country, it's an entirely peaceful, largely melancholy, and clearly well-meaning record. Unfortunately, it's also filled with bewildering decision after bewildering decision.

With arguably one exception, the most enjoyable aspect of the album is Múm's ongoing apprecation for sonic detail, though that can get tiresome fast when such details are attached to cringeworthy songs. You might hear a music box being wound up, or an acoustic guitar string buzzing imperfectly, or what seems to be a didgeridoo. "The Smell of Today Is Sweet Like the Breastmilk in the Wind" uses not only chintzy electronics and vaguely disco-punk percussion, but also sloping strings, guitars with the trebly chime of the Afropop-influenced stuff that has been popular lately, and, oh yeah, Belle and Sebastian-style harmonies that become a liability when most of those instruments drop out-- no Stuart Murdoch literary mien here. Busy hi-hats and rough-hewn handclaps give "Kay-Ray-Kú-Kú-Kó-Kex" a retro-soul tone... if the Residents were a retro-soul band.

The previously mentioned exception is "Húllabbalabbalúú". It's the poppiest song on the album-- not because it mimics existing styles or flashes fashionable r&b influences, but because it brings together plenty of Múm's eccentricities in the service of a triumphant feeling. It helps that the singers get to chant syllables that sound like nonsense to American ears, adding, perhaps tellingly: "In these words we drown." In any event, the song has some of the album's most successful vocals, horn fanfares, and a structure that ebbs and flows.

Two minor problems: The songs are generally slow, samey, and sleep-inducing, and the lyrics, any language differences notwithstanding, are hard to take seriously, even for a guy who raved about I'm From Barcelona. "If you must cry with grief/ Blow your nose right on my sleeve," elfin voices urge on "Blow Your Nose", backed only by slow-motion strings and marimba. "A River Don't Stop to Breathe" has lovely string and percussion parts, with a poignantly rising refrain, but it's a dragging, preachy song overall, less than the sum. Tranquil finale "Ladies of the New Century" spreads out its plodding piano plinks as far as they can go, but offers little to retain all but the most devoted fans' attention between them.

It's probably another one of those coincidences, but Pitchfork's Mark Richardson once heard echoes of "Heart and Soul" in a Múm song, adding, "I'm not suggesting they stole the melody-- I doubt the band has even heard it." In addition to the "If I Were a Carpenter" similarity, there's a line on quasi-title track "Sing Along" that recalls "You Are My Sunshine", in melody and lyrics: "You'll never know," Múm sing, and I want them to add, "...dear", you know? It's enough to make me half-wonder if the album has more of these little references, like a band singing along to songs they don't know-- kind of like the Dirty Projectors' Rise Above, only with half-remembered tunes from childhood instead of a Black Flag album. "You are so beautiful to us," Múm sing more than once, coming on a little strong. "We want to keep you as our pets." Ha?

Washed Out - Life of Leisure EP

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 16, 2009
Link
8.0

 

Did our parents give us too much self-esteem? Not that long ago, message boarders could diss and dismiss boring new bands (insert your least favorite post-punk revivalists here) for sounding like "a copy of a copy of a copy." Fast forward just a few years, and that's exactly what some of the most exciting new bands sound like.

Pastiche and intertextuality are as ancient as postmodernism-- not to mention disco, hip-hop, and the remix-- but childhood memories, in particular, are present now like never before. Today's blockbuster movies are based on yesterday's beloved toys; today's wars and political battles are sequels, too. It isn't surprising that music would reflect the zeitgeist. What's striking is how an international cohort of rising artists has successfully translated this culture of watery VCR transfers and Fisher-Price cassette rips into 1980s-inspired psychedelic music.

Names like Ducktails, Reading Rainbow, VEGA, Pocahaunted, and, especially, Memory Tapes tell you a lot about where these disparate reminiscers are coming from. Arguably, more than genre tags like "glo-fi" or The Wire critic David Keenan's "hypnagogic pop," but those labels can be useful, too. Washed Out, the solo project of Georgia (via South Carolina) multi-instrumentalist Ernest Greene, fits in almost too well with the balmy lo-fi synth atmospherics of peers like Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, Small Black, the higher-fi jj, or the darker, heavier SALEM, as well as the more guitar-based Real Estate, Best Coast, and Pearl Harbour. Washed Out's debut Life of Leisure EP, out digitally now and on 12" early next month (another release, the cassette-only High Times, arrived September 15), isn't at the top of its class, but Greene so far is one of this fledgling aesthetic's most gifted students.

Focusing on romantic nostalgia and homespun textures, Life of Leisure does with 80s soft rock and synth-pop what Glass Candy and Chromatics did with Italo disco a couple of years ago, only Washed Out evokes summer afternoons indoors rather than the Italians Do It Better crew's early-a.m. urban stalking. Out-of-sync PBS-theme synths and videogame lasers meet funky horn breaks on opener "Get Up", as Greene's slurry vocals suggest deep pain. A sampled sax sighs mournfully behind a chopped-up voice, Cut Copy-pasteable beats, and some more indistinct singing on "Lately". Life of Leisure's six tracks, whether poppier and more approachable like "New Theory", or moody and alarming like "Hold Out", tend to cut off suddenly, which gives the EP an appealing, unfinished quality. Like hearing a work in progress: Greene has only been making music under his current moniker for a couple of months, so don't come flaming me if his live shows suck or his Dave Fridmann-produced sophomore album flops in 2013.

More than some contemporaries, though, Washed Out submerges a sense of intense feeling within its 80s-fantasy electronic ether. Greene's "copy of a copy" distance, then, comes across as a form of emotional repression. The yearning-in-utero effect is strongest on woozy centerpiece "Feel It All Around". With blurry singing, cheap-sounding synths, and a humid, syrupy flow, the track suggests an 80s synth pop hit that won't come straight out and cop to itself-- or a young man in love, too tongue-tied (or too stoned?) to admit it. "You feel it all around yourself," Greene echoes. As for what "it" is, the song never says.

If this review itself reads like a "memory of a memory" (to sample another phrase from Keenan), blame "Feel It All Around". Days after the filing of a final draft packed with trenchant insights drawn from the similarities between the track's choral drone and 10cc's 1975 hit "I'm Not in Love", it came to light that Washed Out's signature tune is actually based around a loop from Gary Low's 1983 single "I Want You". The words you're reading changed; the rating didn't. "You're soooooo... fine," it sounds like Greene's finally able to bring himself to say on finale "You'll See It", one of the EP's loveliest and most tuneful tracks; "Don't you fight it." OK, I have to go fast-forward through NutraSweet and Sylvania commercials to watch the TV movie of Alice in Wonderland with Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle now.

Scarlett Johansson / Pete Yorn - Break Up

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 11, 2009
Link
4.7

Scarlett Johansson, the musician, has a way of getting herself into impossible situations. Like, I dunno, making her official recording debut with a version of jazz standard "Summertime". Joining a reunited Jesus and Mary Chain onstage at Coachella. Taking on the Tom Waits songbook. Covering Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" for a romantic comedy based on a self-help book. Or owning the lips that inspired Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl". Um, I guess that last one isn't really Johansson's fault.

Add to the list: Putting out an album inspired by the 1960s duets of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. Especially when the unkempt male in question is Pete Yorn, who had an unfairly panned sleeper of a debut album back in the David Gray era, then followed it with the kind of blandly forgettable slump that made a lot of people wonder why they ever liked either of those guys in the first place. On last year's Anywhere I Lay My Head, Waits' songs and producer David Sitek's woozy 4AD-style majesty would've made for an intriguing listen even if Johansson had been awful (she totes wasn't). Break Up, by contrast, resembles a Yorn album: nine tracks of tastefully beige, electronics-brushed roots-rock. Suddenly, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward's collaboration as She & Him sounds like The Velvet Underground & Nico.

In a way, it's a shame Yorn ever started making comparisons to classic "guy-girl" duos at all. If you take Break Up for what it is-- a low-key project recorded with little preparation in a couple of afternoons three years ago-- then the set has its charms. First single "Relator", for one, with its buzzing instrumental hook and breezy acoustic shuffle, is engagingly playful Rushmore fodder, only a White Stripes credit away from a spot on way too many year-end lists. When Yorn goes uptempo again, with the weeping guitar fills and crisp drum machines of "Blackie's Dead", he comes up with more of the blankly catchy hooks that propelled him to stardom. The song even ends with a mildly satisfying twist: "Darlin', you're forgiven/ I don't like what's goin' on."

That's right: In case you couldn't tell from the name, Break Up is about two characters who gradually find themselves in an impossible situation of their own. This conceit means just that much more extra-musical baggage for the skeptics out there to overlook. But as you might expect, it happens to suit Johansson. When she's able to sing closer to her natural, deeper range, as on a vaguely futuristic cover of late Big Star member Chris Bell's 1978 single "I Am the Cosmos", the husky creak in her voice would demand attention even if you didn't know her from Kirsten Dunst. But the same song is also one of the main instances where Quincy Jones grandson Sunny Levine's generally background-friendly production starts to get in the way, all vwerping bass and annoying tick-tocks. On predictable country-rocker "I Don't Know What to Do", complete with honky-tonk piano, how much fun Johansson is having beams right through lyrics clouded with confusion and doubt.

It's nobody's fault that She & Him's fine Volume One came out first, but the girl-next-door quality, like the usually higher vocal register, suits the glamorous Johansson less than it would the more approachable Deschanel. And that's when Johansson isn't buried in the mix: On banjo-rock plodder "Wear and Tear", she gets in barely a few backing words, while on bossa nova-tinged "Shampoo", Levine's stereo-panned electronic sounds-- twinkling in one channel, crunching in the other-- communicate the couple's disconnect better than anything in their dull dialogue (Johansson: "Run away"; Yorn: "I'd go anywhere with you"). Even on "Relator", Johansson's voice is crammed into the same kind of telephone-style filter that Yorn used to more memorable effect on 2001 single "Life on a Chain".

Yorn's story really isn't as different from Johansson's as you might think. His first big break came through the movies, too, when "Strange Condition" (later re-recorded with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck) landed on the soundtrack to 2000 Farrelly Brothers film Me, Myself & Irene. Nor is Break Up Yorn's first collaboration with a female singer. He previously worked with the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines on "The Man", an otherwise pretty typical Yorn midtempo strummer from his rock-leaning 2006 album, Nightcrawler. More recently, Yorn-- like Johansson-- has turned to veterans from the world of indie rock, working with Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis on this year's cleverly titled Back and Fourth.

Still, "Relator" aside, there's little about this duo's chemistry that lives up to Matt and Kim, let alone Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. "The memory fades away," Yorn sings in that faded Ryan Adams whisper on Break Up's sorrowful finale, "Someday". Their album is better than the knee-jerk beauty haters will tell you, but it rarely has the tunes or emotional impact to make it one of those rare impossible situations you'll actually want to remember. Breaking up shouldn't be this hard to do.

Taken by Trees - East of Eden

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 4, 2009
Link
8.1

 

Feels so unnatural-- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, too. The late qawwali legend has earned the admiration of singers as different as Jeff Buckley, Eddie Vedder, and Devendra Banhart. On 1989's The Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack, he also worked with Peter Gabriel, who ended up releasing six of Khan's albums on his own Real World label. With so much indie culture these past few years stuck in the 1980s, Gabe fave raves Vampire Weekend are simply the most collegiate of recent bands returning to Toto's "Africa" for inspiration. Khan's native Pakistan has been comparatively overlooked.

Victoria Bergsman's recorded output to date is almost quintessentially Swedish. With the Concretes, she introduced Diana Ross shimmy to Mazzy Star haze, staying tuneful enough to soundtrack TV commercials. Lending her shy detachment to Peter Bjorn and John's world-conquering "Young Folks", she participated in a moment likely to define Swedish pop for many casual listeners the way Ace of Base or ABBA used to serve as shorthand for the peace-loving nation's catchiest export. Bergsman's debut album as Taken by Trees, 2007's Open Field, uses the full expanse of PB&J-er Björn Yttling's production (plus a songwriting credit from Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell) to evoke a gorgeously austere northern landscape, the kind of place where you appreciate the sun all the more because it shines so sparingly.

So it's tempting to be skeptical of Bergsman's trip to Pakistan to record a follow-up-- all the more so given an accompanying National Geographic mini-documentary's whiff of cultural condescension. Thankfully, East of Eden suits Taken by Trees the way a shift from folk-pop to terrifying avant-classical suited oft-mentioned German antecedent Nico. Bergsman's plaintive purr can't match Khan's multi-octave ululations, and unlike the late Buckley, she doesn't try. Instead, she and accompanist Andreas Söderström-- working with local musicians who've played alongside the maestro-- embrace the ecstatic peacefulness of this Sufi musical tradition's rhythms and instrumentation. Production from Studio's Dan Lissvik gives the nine-song, half-hour set an ascetic grace, sort of like secular devotional music. How very Scandinavian.

In truth, Taken by Trees' debut already had a similar religious quality, albeit owing more to the introspective folk of Nick Drake; excellent remixes by the Tough Alliance and Air France showed how much those songs could gain by leaving Europe. On East of Eden, sinuous woodwind and rippling hand percussion help give plainspoken love songs like "Day by Day" or "Watch the Waves" an eternal resonance, which Bergsman's understated poise only deepens. Söderström's dusty classical guitar should please Studio devotees on haunting opener "To Lose Someone", while from out of the swaying call and response of "Greyest Love of All" rises a perfect prayer for our time of endless Web 2.0 connectivity and ever-shortening attention spans: "I hope you'll find some peace of mind."

Noah Lennox, aka Animal Collective's Panda Bear, is no stranger to prayerfulness, field recordings, or non-rock influences; that he and Bergsman would develop a mutual affinity is only fitting. After the fashion of Studio, TTA, Air France, and some of Gothenburg, Sweden's other musicians, who like to retitle and reimagine the songs they interpret, Taken by Trees transforms Merriweather Post Pavilion highlight "My Girls" into intimate, harmonium-humming "My Boys". It's a little paradoxical, recording an ode to simple domesticity in a region where religious fundamentalism led men to consider the unmarried Bergsman "everyone's property," but as with any great hymn, this spirited meditation on indie-style puritanism should have the power to move even non-believers. Lennox, in turn, adds his incantatory vocals to the nylon-stringed regret of "Anna", where having "way too much tonight" can mean alcohol, fighting, or both.

If you go straight long enough, somebody once said, you'll end up where you were. East of Eden, in that sense, isn't so far from Studio's West Coast: a masterful, hypnotic album that draws on a world of influences but is ultimately limited by none. So the most distracting misstep is "Wapas Karna", essentially a field recording fronted by a qawwali singer rather than Bergsman herself, while two other less immediate tracks are compelling mostly for their impulse toward cultural merger: the sparsely adorned, Swedish-language melancholy of "Tidens Gång", which melts into ambient chirps in under two minutes, or the closing drone of "Bekännelse", apparently a setting of a poem by (German) writer Herman Hesse that reflects some of Bergsman's liberal guilt. "If you know what you want to create and are determined, you can do it wherever you are," Bergsman recently told London's The Independent. "I'd rather live in sunny California." This must be the place.

The Temper Trap - Conditions

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
August 24, 2009
Link
4.6

 

The Temper Trap didn't come out of nowhere. But even in an age of instant global communication, Australia is still pretty far away from most of the rest of us. So when this Melbourne rock foursome with stadium-sized ambitions first landed in my inbox last October, it was a modest revelation. Curtis Vodka, Alaska's remixer extraordinaire, was pushing all the right tech-textural buttons on an epic reworking of "Sweet Disposition", a majestic anthem which, if annoyingly derivative, had "mainstream hit" written all over it. Listeners who Shazam'd the original after hearing it in ads for Sky Sports TV in the UK-- or, stateside, on the trailer and soundtrack to alt-emo romcom (500) Days of Summer-- probably know the feeling.

Hemispheric differences may have given the Temper Trap room to develop their radio-friendly sound without getting pushed prematurely into the spotlight (for real: sorry, Black Kids), but otherwise their debut album could've been made just about anywhere. Conditions is one for the Coldplay set-- all tightly executed grandiosity and U2 pedals, generally with pounding drums, soaring vocals about steadfastness or mortality or whatever, one rumbling bass note per arpeggiated guitar chord, and a modest drizzling of synths. Unfortunately, when you adopt the trappings of revolutionary significance without showing much interest in advancing beyond the revolutions of 20 years ago, you sound ridiculous. Southern conservatives are super concerned about racial discrimination now, you guys.

Defined by almost any measure except musical creativity or lyrical ingenuity, the Temper Trap are a lot better than I'm making them sound. Dougie Mandagi's virtuosic falsetto is the kind of instrument that should come with a money-back Jeff-Buckley-comparison guarantee. When Mandagi comes in, over ecclesiastical keyboard stabs and handclaps on opener "Love Lost", there's a brief glimmer of hope Conditions will end up being more like TV on the Radio, with all that New York group's restless adventurousness, than, um, whichever band we gave that "U.2" rating. His bandmates are no slouches, either, as instrumental finale "Drum Song" shows. If its jagged rhythmic attack owes something to Arctic Monkeys, then it's no coincidence-- producer Jim Abbiss also helmed the brainy Brits' fateful debut, along with albums for Kasabian, Adele, and others.

What the Temper Trap do devastatingly well is drape post-office-party mistake-hookup tackiness in the lofty imagery of global struggle. You can just picture Mandagi standing on a mountaintop for "Sweet Disposition", his hair blowing in Bono's wind, but remember, ladies: Some insincere sketchball with limited imagination is going to use this to try to get you to have sex with him. "Just stay there/ 'Cause I'll be coming over," Mandagi booms. "Won't stop to surrender." Well, love is a battlefield, right?

Elsewhere, the Temper Trap's pairing of sweeping portentousness with mundane douchebaggery is trickier to overlook. "I pledge myself allegiance to a battle not to sleep at home," Mandagi clarifies on another single, the reasonably catchy uptempo electro-rocker "Fader". Synth-dripping slow jam "Fools" adds, "I want it, I want it, I want it," amid rebukes to unnamed, uhh, fools. Cold War Kids-ish indie nod "Down River" pulls out all the orchestral, choral, and vaguely baptismal flourishes in Neon Bible's book to repeat, "Go, don't stop." And remember "Love Lost"? It adapts a line from "Amazing Grace" into a request to "flash your heart." Yeah, open up your shirt and-- ohhh. One more in the name of love: Latest UK single "Science of Fear" samples Robert F. Kennedy's famous remarks on the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. I take it Mandagi still hasn't found what he's looking for.

It's telling to learn where, in fact, the Temper Trap did come from. The first thing producer Abbiss apparently heard from the band was a demo of "Soldier On", Conditions' Muse-rific nadir. Mandagi tells the BBC, "His wife really liked it so apparently they had a moment together and out of obedience to his wife Jim decided to record us." The six-minute track moves from Grace-ful guitar and falsetto into gnashing prog-rock bombast, until Mandagi is seriously howling at "death." I'm gonna assume he means the little one-- what the French call "la petite mort."

Smith Westerns - Smith Westerns

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
August 7, 2009
Link
7.7

 

Girls know what boys want. But a little subterfuge can still go a long way. On his hit single, 22-year-old singer/rapper Drake insists, "This one's for you," then cops some "gray sweatpants, no makeup" sweet talk en route to envisioning himself "all up in your slot." He recently admitted to MTV that "it's not the most heartfelt song." Where Drake talks dirty and sounds Auto-Tune clean, the Smith Westerns take the opposite approach. Like the Beatles, though, these four Chicago teenagers don't want to hold your hand-- they want to do more.

Don't let the Fab Four mention throw you: From this young Windy City group, retro-rock doesn't feel like a history class. Rummaging through 1970s glam, Phil Spector teen-pop, and Nuggets garage-punk with the youthful abandon of kids finding new toys in the attic, the Smith Westerns' self-titled debut exudes an earnestness almost as pure as its recording levels are deafening. Their simple, sweet choruses about boys and girls in love could spike the punch at a 1970s TV show (OK, "Freaks & Geeks"/"That '70s Show") school dance. Parent chaperones would be none the wiser.

When singing guitarist Cullen Omori, his bassist brother Cameron, second guitarist Max Kakacek, and a drummer known to Google only as Hal have the tunes to make themselves heard over their vintage aesthetic, The Smith Westerns' teenage kicks are hard to beat. Take string-swept glam ballad "Be My Girl", which softly punctuates one of the year's most wrenchingly innocent hooks with somewhat pervier pick-up lines. There's less lyrical subtext, but no less raunchy production, on the glam-rock boogie of "Girl in Love", a come-on cursorily addressing the fleetingness of youth. It's only fitting that in a year-old YouTube video featuring scratchy sockhop swooner "Tonight", the Smith Westerns both look and sound like the Black Lips' good-bad not-evil twins.

These guys are sort of literally true to their school-- garage-rocker Miss Alex White is a fellow Northside College Prep magnet-school alum-- and their time on the road with the likes of Jay Reatard and Nobunny is evident on fine 60s-style frat-rocker "Gimme Some Time". With fuzzed-out xylophone, frenetic opener "Dreams" suggests the group's most recent tour with Girls and Los Campesinos! might serve them better for a follow-up. "Diamond Boys" almost earns its piano on the strength of its adolescent grandiosity, but "We Stay Out" lets lo-fi become the end rather than the means, with a guitar line that sounds like a bee buzzing underwater.

Japandroids, another loud punkish group concerned with youth and girls, ask a cathartic question on Post-Nothing's "The Boys Are Leaving Town". DFA signees Free Energy channel Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town" on their recent "Dream City" single. The Smith Westerns turn to lighthearted psych-folk for their own declaration: "Boys Are Fine". Then, on blithely woo-oohing fuzz-popper "The Glam Goddess", they actually go and say it: "I wanna hold your hand." Boys will be boys.

Delorean - Ayrton Senna EP

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 28, 2009
Link
8.4

 

Man, that Wavves "meltdown" really bummed me out. Not because a rising lo-fi rocker acted stupidly-- who doesn't sometimes?-- but because I'd always imagined being on ecstasy in Barcelona would be a lot more fun. After all, some of the most rewarding music from the last couple of years basically promised as much. Or was Swedish imprint Sincerely Yours being insincere? How about U.S. labels True Panther and Underwater Peoples? From Oslo to Melbourne, from indie rockers to club kids, sunny electronic euphoria has been one of the late-2000s pop underground's richest musical nodes.

Just as that endless blissed-out summery vibe unites everyone from Panda Bear to Todd Terje, Barcelona electro-pop four-piece Delorean pull up at the intersection between several disparate and exciting movements. Start with their remixes: In the U.S., the bedroom pop of Glasser and disco-punk of Lemonade; in the UK, the NME-approved guitar rock of the Big Pink and Mystery Jets; and, right in Delorean's hometown, the sample-heavy tropical psych of El Guincho. They can be as airy and suave as Air France or Phoenix, but their unremitting beats are also plenty huge enough to convert fans of Cut Copy or MGMT. John Talabot, a Barcelona DJ who's released cosmic disco grooves for Munich label Permanent Vacation, lends a house remix to the group's current EP, Ayrton Senna.

The third release on Fool House, the new label from French indie-dance blog Fluo Kids, Ayrton Senna represents a similar kind of convergence. In the early 2000s, Delorean originally set out to be something like Jimmy Eat World crossed with Elliott Smith, keyboardist Unai Lazcano confided to The Pop Manifesto magazine last summer. By the time of their promising Transatlantic KK album a couple of years ago, Delorean had absorbed the synth-pop sleekness of New Order and the echoey guitar spikes of post-punk revivalists like !!! or the Rapture, with one transcendent moment: so-called "breakhop" finale "Apocalypse Ghetto Blast". On the Ayrton Senna EP, the group's burgeoning dance-pop savvy comes into bloom with three unstoppable summer bangers, the Talabot remix, and a digital-only bonus cut.

Despite their rock roots, Delorean do tracks, not songs. Singer/bassist Ekhi Lopetegi is a Ph.D. candidate with a background in philosophy, but Delorean use his Factory-ready yelp more as just another element to loop than as a vehicle for delivering lyrical content. "Seasun" is the best example of Delorean's layered approach to composition, methodically building 1990s piano-house keyboards, disembodied female vocals, Baltimore club-ready handclaps, and a ringing guitar line into the ultimate beach house (not Beach House). But "Deli", with its breakbeats and youthful enthusiasm, and "Moonson", all 90s-house liberation and anthem-rock yearning, are almost as thrilling. Talabot's "Kids & Drum" remix of "Seasun" could well hold up after even more listens than the original version, its hand-percussion samples reaching closer to the islands but its vast, clean lines stretching out toward space.

Prior to Ayrton Senna, arguably Delorean's most compelling release was its remix for oft-misunderstood electro-pop Serge Gainsbourgs the Teenagers. On last year's occasionally brilliant Reality Check, the French band's "Love No" is a hilarious, sleazy, and brutally scathing snipe at a nagging girlfriend who disapproves of the narrator's self-absorbed internet stonerdom. Delorean's bass-heavy "No Love" version-- like Studio's "Possible" rework of the Shout Out Louds' "Impossible", only more dramatic-- strips away all the negative lyrics, ditching a chorus of "I'm not in love" and instead repeating the big question: "Are you in love?" Well, that's a hell of a thing for a pop song to ask. The track promises dancefloor absolution, only to nag at the heart in a way the Teenagers' lame girlfriend never could.

Summer always ends too soon, and before long I'm sure beachy dance music will sound as cloying as rock fans considered the Beach Boys by the late 1960s. Like Wavves in Barcelona, Delorean recognize there's a dark side to their ecstatic vision, the aching truth that utopia-- literally, "no place"-- can never totally be fulfilled. As equally impressive bonus track "Big Dipper" puts it: "Babe, if you want to we could run away up into the sun/ But we would only fade from black to black." Delorean's similarities to other "sunny", "shimmering" new artists, ultimately, are far less important than their similarities to other practitioners of well-crafted and instantly gripping pop.

The Boy Least Likely To - The Best B Sides Ever

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 23, 2009
Link
7.4

"Our last album was meant to be our 'angry' album," the Boy Least Likely To announced in a recent tweet. For guys who introduced themselves to the world by asking us to be gentle with them, "angry" is a relative term. The story of the UK indie pop duo's wonderfully ramshackle 2005 debut, The Best Party Ever, is something like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah without the New York media glare or square-baiting obliqueness: from homemade 7"s to Oscar-night soda commercials, all in a few short years. 2009's The Law of the Playground adds depth, if little breadth, to their near-perfectly realized birthday-party aesthetic, while among the professionally hip, admitting your own insecurities remains as frowned upon as ever.

When your entire band concept is based around identifying with the sensitive but neurotic outcasts, your B-sides better damn well bring your A-game. The Best B Sides Ever doesn't disappoint. Originally bundled with Rough Trade Shop pre-orders for The Law of the Playground, and now available only at independent record stores, this slight but almost wholly satisfying disc is well worth any TBLLT fan's recession-pinched dollar. With two revealing covers and originals that at times rival their A-sides, singer/vocalist Jof Owen and multi-instrumentalist/composer Pete Hobbs keep their hearts precariously on their sleeve and their production colorfully ramshackle. Yup: acoustic guitar, banjo, synths, recorder, xylophone, stuffed-animals-on-parade drums, and whispery singing. Dudes who hate this shit and anything else that smacks of wimpiness, you can buy two and say it's for your sister. Deep down, you're one of us, too.

The covers aren't far from TBLLT's usual territory, but they're expertly enfolded in the group's deceptively childlike universe. Where Limp Bizkit made George Michael's "Faith" safe for the moshers, this version emphasizes the song's simple emotions and gold-plated pop craft. There's jauntiness to spare, sure, but little trace of irony. If this "Faith" turns chart-pop into twee-pop, then the disc's spare, faithful cover of the Field Mice's "Between Hello and Goodbye" could just as easily introduce Sarah Records to the charts. You don't need a tattered collection of 1980s NMEs to enjoy simple guitar, heartfelt vocals, twinkling percussion, and a beautifully aching romantic ballad, just ambiguous enough to reward listen after listen. (You do need the Field Mice, though, for your personal enjoyment.)

Elsewhere, the originals shed new light on an established persona, with results that range from the exceptional to the "mediocre for the Boy Least Likely To". With a bottom made out of rubber, a top-end made out of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails, "Oddballs" falls closer to the latter category, suggesting a name for the CD artwork's fine fuzzy wuzzies but breaking little new ground. Closer "Cuddle Me", meanwhile, at first seems like an almost too-literal encapsulation of the group's softer side. Within those watery sound effects and faraway rum-pum-pums, however, is an overwhelming vulnerability that should still be a treat for core indie-pop fans. "I hurt the things I love/ Because it stops them hurting me," Owen sings. If you can relate, you can spend a rainy afternoon daydreaming to this.

The Best B-Sides Ever is best when it's tinged with nostalgia. It's a kind of nostalgia that works both ways: Lost childhood becomes a metaphor for lost love on midtempo banjo-synth reminiscence "Every Grubby Little Memory", but "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Boy Again" hopes to find the past in the future. While the guitar underneath the latter song's outer-space synth burbles comes perilously close to Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me", the vivid imagery of felt-tip pens and first-snow excitement easily wins out. Similarly, "Rock Upon a Porch With You"-- one of TBLLT's best-ever songs-- looks forward to growing not-so-dignified and old together with a loved one, puttering around "on the front steps of our sweet retirement home," remembering when they still had their own teeth. Don't make these guys get angry.

jj - jj n° 2

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 17, 2009
Link
8.6

 

0101, 0103, 0107, 0108, 0113, and 0115. Since all jj choose to show of themselves is their music, video, and occasional blood-spattered merch, then those Sincerely Yours catalogue numbers represent the sum total of what we know about them. Hell, we wouldn't even know jj were a "them" had the group's Gothenburg, Sweden-based, Tough Alliance-owned label not confirmed that. So... they're mysterious-- but not inscrutable: Despite a brief discography that's already geekily byzantine enough for anybody who ever bought into the legend of Factory Records, jj's full-length debut is as easy to enjoy as whatever the last CD was you brought home with a giant cannabis leaf on the cover. They're as naive as they are cynical-- or is it the other stupid way around?-- and they manage to be pretty, touching, funny, and motivating, in different ways, in all the right places, for nine songs lasting 28 minutes.

You don't need me to tell you for the 128th time (320th if you're at CD quality) how digital file distribution has spread sounds and ideas across the globe during the current decade, and jj have earned a place among the current wave of pop globalization, sharing both the island sounds and sticky-fingered irreverence of their labelmates the Tough Alliance, Air France, and the Honeydrips. Sure, jj still carry traces of iconic twee label Sarah Records, but they celebrate a broader definition of "pop". Sometimes, as on "Lollipop"-biting slo-mo raver "Ecstasy", jj do this by borrowing from global hip-hop culture. But they also participate. Never by straight-up rapping, but by expanding the reach of ambient music-- defined expansively, as Brian Eno once did, as music that "suggests, a place, a landscape, a soundworld which you inhabit"-- to include a whole new kind of swagger. "Of course there is people out to get me," a female vocalist sings on "My Hopes and Dreams" as hand percussion evokes the Avalanches' beach blowouts, hypnotic guitar recalls German Kosmiche Muzik, and gusts of winds whistle over high-noon Ennio Morricone strings.

Then again, on the same song, jj's singer just wants "someone to share my hopes and dreams with"-- a humbler goal to be sure, but jj excel just as much at strummy intimacy as they do at lavish blissouts. The lo-fi hooks on "Tell It to My Heart"-biting closer "Me & Dean" suggests TTA's aching teen-pop cover "Lucky", only done as an original this time. The pisstake-y giggles also make you wonder if you're hearing their mixtape outro.

When jj drift closer to early-1990s ambient-house, they still allow emotion to flood through the textures, and they never start repeating themselves. Opener "Things Will Never Be the Same Again" sets almost new-agey strings and Enya-esque sailing imagery to a bouncy Caribbean rhythm: "I close my eyes and remember/ A place in the sun where we used to live." For all the flickering synths and rainforest percussion of "Masterplan", we also get Top Gun guitar rocketry, faux-innocent-as-Disney sing-song, and that reporter guy from YouTube going, "I'm dyin' in this fucking country-ass fucked-up town." jj n° 2 may be easy on the ears, but it isn't wallpaper.

At their most ideal, ambient, hip-hop, punk, and the most crassly commercial pop all have in common an "anything goes" approach. Like any ideal, this usually gets fucked up pretty fast. "New Age" harnesses ambient's chill-out pleasantness to eco-politics and yuppie mysticism; old rappers start dissing younger rappers for not following in their footsteps or being more socially conscious; the punk and indie traditions become as idol-worshiping as the classic-rockers they sought to displace. jj obliterate that bullshit and get back to a place where Lil Wayne can be ambient, and Enya can show up on an album with a pot leaf on the cover.

Free mp3 "From Africa to Málaga", on some days my favorite track on the album, is almost as suited for a cruise-ship commercial as Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life". But it also faces Important Ideas like death and art with the clear-eyed precocity of an adolescent, riding in on trade winds with a message that could speak to middle-school cheerleaders and middle-aged soccer moms and middlebrow-loathing former punks alike: "The thought that you found/ Takes you to town/ Smashes your face/ Burns out your heart/ Then you go home and turn it into art." Pop's just fine, too, thanks.

VEGA - Well Known Pleasures EP

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 10 2009
Link
6.0

Alan Palomo was wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt in publicity photos before TMZ told us the King of Pop had left the building. Earlier, as frontman for Denton, Texas, electro-funkateers Ghosthustler, Palomo appealed to Nintendo Power Glove nostalgia in a memorable video by director Pete Ohs. Now based in Austin and leading VEGA, Palomo has moved closer to the "dream" side of the "dreamwave" descriptor coined for his acts, but he's still refashioning the past with the loving dedication of so many VHS-to-YouTube archivists.

Palomo may have his Power Glove in a few too many young-urban-retro-futuristic pies. Lefse Records has just announced a release date for the upcoming debut album by Neon Indian, Palomo's project with video artist Alicia Scardetta; at their best, the group's synth-dripping bedroom-pop hypnotism rivals some of Deerhunter-er Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound home recordings. Meanwhile, in Ghosthustler, Palomo made head-banging dance-pop with the twiddly synths of Chromeo and the aggressive distortion of then-ascendant French house labels Ed Banger and Kitsuné. VEGA's Joy Division-referencing debut EP, Well Known Pleasures-- originally slated for May release, and finally out digitally this month-- blasts that basic sound into more cosmic-disco-influenced frontiers, with pillowy electronic drifts and proggy solos.

Given the evolution in band logos, it's tempting to see VEGA as Sega to Ghosthustler's N.E.S.: same computing power, more of a "cult" appeal. Except Well Known Pleasures has a couple of tracks that seem a bit more immediately crowd-pleasing than anything I heard from Ghosthustler. Opener "No Reasons", with its chopped-up vocals and laser squiggles, is a fine piece of French-touched synth-pop that ought to win over some fans of Cut Copy. And the title track, described by Discobelle as a "smooth synthy pop track with a nice housey feeling," is basically just that, though the still-developing vocals and lyrics shouldn't keep Phoenix up nights.

In other places, despite taking a celestial name that most music fans probably associate with Suzanne ("Tom's Diner", "Luka") or Alan (Suicide), VEGA could almost score the credits of a vintage episode of PBS's "Nova". Slow, dramatic arpeggios float out from high-sustain synths on space-disco power ballad "Fondly", which ends with the type of noodling prog-isms you'd expect on a Lindstrøm epic. Closing synth lullaby "Other End" is over and forgotten in barely a minute and a half. But "Kyoto Gardens" is the only spot where VEGA really fall flat, stumbling over the same well-worn lyrical material as Little Boots' "New in Town" with a by now familiar formula of 80s electro, turn-of-the-millennium French house, and late-2000s spacey expansiveness.

All that adds up to two pretty good tracks and three somewhat satisfying but generally unremarkable ones, in less than 30 minutes. If you're as focused on VEGA's particular niche as they are, then Well Known Pleasures might well be a pleasure. That's still a long way from the all-embracing pop of the guy on the T-shirt. I'm more excited for Palomo's future-- retro or otherwise.

Various Artists - A Psychedelic Guide to Monsterism Island

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 26, 2009
Link
6.0

Monsters, in general, are pretty hard to ignore. So it is with the visual creations of Welsh artist and toymaker Pete Fowler. Readers of this review will most likely know Fowler from the space aliens and other strange cartoonish beasties he has drawn for the covers of every Super Furry Animals album since 1997 except for one (2007's Hey Venus!, created by Japan's Keiichi Tanaami). Love 'em or hate 'em, Fowler's fanciful, bulbous images have helped SFA establish a visual aesthetic every bit as distinctive as their music, with a shared spirit of childlike mischief and spaced-out merriment.

A Psychedelic Guide to Monsterism Island-- the follow-up to 2005's impossibly scarce The Sounds of Monsterism Island, Vol. 1-- is basically a soundtrack to the lovingly detailed dreamworld inhabited by Fowler's characters. In film terms, though, it works more like a score than a hit-crammed blockbuster soundtrack, conjuring its woozy and whimsical mood out of 20 mostly instrumental tracks of folk, prog, cosmic disco, and hazy Moog rock. In other words, it's uncharacteristically easy to ignore, floating almost at the edge of perception. As with the like-minded psychedelia on London label Ghost Music, however, you shouldn't necessarily hold that against it. This can be transportative stuff.

Even if the compilation isn't always mind-blowing, psych nerds and obscurity-seekers should be able to find a few choice tracks to spin or sample. Super Furries frontman Gruff Rhys' "Wild Robots Power Up" sounds like its title, all chintzy electronic beats and hypnotic power-station drones. The Future Sound of London, appearing under their Amorphous Androgynous alias, go in for woolly psych-rock that's as bubbly as Fowler's creations. Inclusions from Luke Vibert, Beyond the Wizard Sleeve (aka Richard Norris), Circulus, and Belbury Poly range from sine-wave workouts to ominous grooves and even hobbit-ready lute-folk. The bright strums of Brazilian DJ/producer duo "Magic Morning" on "Monsters at Work" are quietly revelatory, inhabiting a universe not far from Quiet Village or recent nu-Balearic.

The disc's biggest flaw lies in apparently assuming we've already made the trip to Monsterism Island rather than gently guiding us there. The krautrock repetitions of Marc Shearer's "Magma on My Mind" or the Southern-fried electric guitar noodling of Wolf People's "Village Strollin'" are enjoyable enough on their own, but as compiled here, it all starts to blend together. Many listeners will find themselves drifting off-- losing themselves not in Monsterism Island, but in the late-2000s' many realtime distractions. The spoken-word interludes are a cute affectation, and they could take on more meaning if Fowler's talked-about children's TV show ever gets off the ground, but you won't find yourself wanting to listen to them very often.

Still, every time my head starts nodding, A Psychedelic Guide to Monsterism Island jolts me back to attentiveness with moments of Fowlerian wryness. Take the Advisory Circle's "Lair of the Grolfax", which sounds like "You Only Live Twice" covered as intergalactic lounge music by Air. "What a strange dream," a monster's deep, gruff voice intones on the closing track, summing up the whole collection. "It ebbs from my mind like treacle." Monster treacle?

God Help the Girl - God Help the Girl

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 23, 2009
Link
7.5

 

"Girl singer needed for autumnal recording project," the ad in the paper said. "Autumnal," of course, being the Queen's-- and the critics'-- preferred English for, uh, "fall-like." You know that song where, when people talk about the fall, Jens Lekman thinks they're talking about Mark E. Smith? Stuart Murdoch probably thinks they're talking about the Garden of Eden.

After all, the main character in God Help the Girl-- a new album of songs from the Belle and Sebastian singer/songwriter's planned musical-film project-- is called Eve. She's voiced angelically by Catherine Ireton, cover girl for the Scottish septet's "White Collar Boy" single and one half of a sleepy acoustic pop duo called the Go Away Birds. Ireton is one of nine singers (incuding the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon) joining members of Belle and Sebastian for the recording, and her Irish-Zooey-Deschanel-next-door vocals have ended up gracing 10 of the set's 14 songs. But not until after an internet-wide sing-off. "The competition was me showing a startling lack of faith in what was right in front of me, but I had to see what was out there," Murdoch recently told London's Guardian.

From the humble school project that became 1996 debut Tigermilk to the professional pop majesty of The Life Pursuit a decade later, the Scottish pop savant's work has been almost one leap of faith after another. Murdoch lands on solid ground again with God Help the Girl, which has catchy, jangling girl-group ditties aplenty, a little theatrical flourish thanks to Belle and Sebastian trumpeter Mick Cooke's orchestral arrangements, and at least one typically Murdoch-esque character, Eve. The imagery is always vivid, even when the plot isn't. From what I can tell, Ireton's bookish ingenue gives herself to the Holy Trinity: sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. God love 'er.

Always one for evocative character sketches, Murdoch clearly relishes his role as demiurge of God Help the Girl's self-contained universe. First single "Come Monday Night" is a good preview, with the wispy lilt of early Camera Obscura and a way of lingering on "the gray of ordinariness" long enough to show how it's lined with silvery subtleties. Like, that restless first evening between a disappointing weekend and another drab workday. The way sleep leaves a face "crumpled and creased." And the full rundown of Eve obsessing over some guy she likes ("Please stop me there, I'm even boring myself!"). At times, Murdoch's realistically elaborate fiction points to its own phoniness. "Life could be musical comedy," suggests "Hiding Neath My Umbrella", a bittersweet Murdoch-Ireton duet over waltzing piano and swelling strings.

God Help the Girl opens with a delicate new version of The Life Pursuit centerpiece "Act of the Apostle II". Switched from "senior year" to "senior ward," and re-titled simply "Act of the Apostle", the song also drops its last verse-- making the whole thing more prologue-like-- and gains a bit of Andrews Sisters swing. For all the specifics about a sick narrator and fighting parents, "Act of the Apostle" is still essentially a pop kid's update of the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll": "My Damascan road's my transistor radio." Her life was saved by girl groups.

Or was it? The nuance-rich Murdoch is characteristically coy when it comes to certain details. He's mentioned musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar or the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory film as inspirations; my fellow 1980s babies may remember Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act, where all those awesome Motown songs turned out to make real nice hymns if you did the ol' Christian rock trick and replaced "him" with "Him". So The Life Pursuit's "Funny Little Frog", sung here by Internet contest winner Brittany Stallings, might not work as a soul song, but just think: a soul song. About someone who is everywhere, but you don't think of in a physical way. Someone you might go and visit on rainy Sundays.

"She was into S&M and Bible studies," Murdoch once sang. Eve's first romantic experience is creepy, Murdoch offering to rub and scrub her during the ironically formal strings and piano of "Pretty Eve in the Tub". No wonder she winds up in the arms of Hannon's hammy rake on "Perfection as a Hipster", asking for haircare tips even as she wastes away from lack of nutrition. Asya, of Seattle teen keyboard-drums trio Smoosh, may have an even more girlish voice than Ireton's, but on "I Just Want Your Jeans", she's looking for boys to make her "go, 'Ouch!'"-- heck, she's "open to dark surprises." And somewhere in there I just skipped a couple of totally skippable instrumentals.

The last two songs are among the album's most inspired. "I'll Have to Dance With Cassie" suggests Eve has returned to the church of rock'n'roll; now that she knows her "dream boy" doesn't exist, she's shimmying with a girl friend like they're a pair of boxing kangaroos. On closing number "A Down and Dusky Blonde", having "fried" her head-- another double entendre?-- Eve joins an entire sisterhood of female singers. She hasn't been getting her apple a day, so a doctor counsels, "A woman does not live by the printed word/ Forgive yourself, and eat." How about it, Eve?

"I need a friend and I choose you," the final song continues, with a vow to "forget the kiss and feel." Hmm. God Help the Girl is a spirited expansion of some of Murdoch's best ideas, but until the film finishes shooting-- set to start next year-- we'll probably just have wild-ass guesses like mine as to the real story. "I feel like I have God for a pal because no one else would have me," Murdoch writes in an online journal entry. "Maybe that's the basis for a lot of religion. He's the invisible friend that it's OK to have as an adult." Tell you this much, He's in the details.

God Help the Girl - God Help the Girl

Video / Album Review
ABC News
Link
June 23, 2009

Little Boots - Hands

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 18, 2009
Link
5.9

 

"Pop" is easy to write and even easier to say, but it's not so easy to pull off successfully. Victoria "Little Boots" Hesketh has been outspoken in embracing the term. "A pop song is just this three-and-a-half-minute nugget, but it can be so powerful," the synth-toting songstress from Blackpool, England, told Carson Daly the night of her first L.A. show. "My problem with a lot of mainstream pop artists-- I love the songs, and I think they're great songs a lot of the time, but they don't have enough character for me."

A musician since childhood, Hesketh once got rejected in the opening rounds of the UK's "Pop Idol". She went on to play in a jazz trio, a big band, and, by 2005, a punk-charged synth group called Dead Disco. That's around when L.A. session mainstay Greg Kurstin (one half of jazzy electropop duo the Bird and the Bee; previously of 1990s one-hit wonders Geggy Tah) started prodding Hesketh to focus on writing pop songs. From there, it's almost too good to be true: One minute she's covering Human League on YouTube in her pajamas, the next she's partying with Kanye West and Brandon Flowers. If you're a former "TRL" host, that's a refreshing do-it-yourself tale. If you're a more skeptical sort, you check the price tag of the Japanese electronic instrument she has helped publicize, and you wonder.

Little Boots' debut album, then, is a mainstream pop effort with an indie-friendly narrative. It's a savvy approach, effectively bridging the gap between poptimism and alt snobbery. One three-and-a-half-minute nugget comes after another, with the directness of Madonna and the fashion sense, too: There's blog-house distortion, Italo-disco sweep, and the dayglo tranceyness of recent electronic-based pop-rap hits. The hooks, however, tend to be more Hard Candy than The Immaculate Collection. I really like one song, and I think they're decent enough songs a lot of the time, but all too often Hands is as lacking in character as the music Hesketh criticizes.

Hands' most distinguishing characteristic is an unusual level of meta-pop self-awareness. Kind of clever the first time: "Stuck on Repeat", produced by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard and co-written with Goddard and Kurstin, still throbs like a Kylie Minogue crush. But then there's latest single "New in Town", a glammy going-out song that also doubles as an artist introduction-- she wants to take us out tonight, and she wants to make us feel all right, but staying in sounds good, too. On "Remedy", producer/co-writer RedOne (Akon, Lady Gaga) lends generic club-rap swagger but can't convince that this "music is the cure"; bittersweet soft-rocker "Tune Into My Heart", co-written with accomplished Belgian producer/songwriter Pascal Gabriel (New Order's "Regret", Dido), asks what's the frequency and never quite finds its signal.

Even the songs that aren't commenting on themselves lyrically sound like they're commenting on themselves musically. Despite radio-ready production and commercial hooks that tell us we're hearing pop, it can take some hours of intense listening before most of these tunes ever stick in the head, and there's little to no emotional investment. "Symmetry" has the Human League's Phil Oakey, and "Mathematics" has a metaphor inspired by Sylvia Plath's "Love Is a Parallax", but their by-the-numbers synth-pop is more science than art. "I'm like a moth into the flame," Hesketh coos on "Hearts Collide", a sultry Minogue-vogue spacewalk. We all have someone we like with trite lyrics or an average voice, but what makes the best pop songs successful is that they have some quality uniquely their own, and that's mostly absent here.

Paradoxically, Hands works best as pop when Hesketh taps indie-famous collaborators. The second-best song is also the second single, "Meddle", where the production and songwriting team from "Stuck on Repeat" turn toward rock's angst and propulsion. Simian Mobile Disco's Jas Shaw lends his skills to a pair of solid if lyrically dismal tracks: the spacious "Click" ("I thought you were a condition/ That no one else could treat") and the pattering "Ghosts", which has a deftly pirouetting melody that helps make it one of the only songs here that doesn't sound like Hesketh is trying to be someone else, someone more mundane.

A few years ago, I wrote a column suggesting that the ideal pop star of today is someone like Robyn: polished chart-pop sound, still writes her own songs. Then along came Lily Allen. Now even in country, a genre not traditionally given to valuing singer/songwriters, you find people praising Taylor Swift because she writes her own songs and records for an "indie" label. So Little Boots, with her unabashed love of pop and her honest-to-goodness instrumental ability-- check the piano-driven hidden track-- has the right package for the current moment, and if Lady Gaga and La Roux can click with the public, maybe she will, too. Then again, calling yourself pop isn't guaranteed to bring you popularity. Songs don't get stuck on repeat unless people can't get them out of their heads.

Client - Command

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 16, 2009
Link
5.2

 

Great poetry, it's been said, contains more information than political speeches. Because in a really creative poem, you never know what's coming next. So like, a film by Orson Welles contains more information than other films of its day, because nobody else would shoot their scenes in exactly the same way. Sad to say, Client are not their generation's chilly UK electro-pop version of Orson Welles.

In fact, Client have basically defined themselves by withholding information-- from their anti-image image to their repetive, generic, but nonetheless well-constructed and hooky music. Core duo Kate Holmes and Sarah Blackwood originally took on the code names Client A and Client B because they didn't want to be known as, respectively, the wife of former Creation Records chief Alan McGee and the former singer for 1990s British act Dubstar. That's understandable. On fourth album Command, Client race toward goth night at your local disco, with Killing Joke's Youth (fresh off a collaboration with Sir Paul McCartney) and the Sneaker Pimps' Joe Wilson splitting production duties. Look at the cover art, though: The uniform has changed, but Client are still proudly faceless.

That's understandable, too-- not for nothing did Client cover Adam and the Ants' cynical post-punk side "Zerox" on 2007's slightly more rocking Heartland-- but their lack of a discrete identity also makes for pretty forgettable albums. Vague lyrics continue to be a sticking point, and it doesn't help that they repeat what few lyrics they have over and over again. Why, the screeching "Satisfaction" and faster, more dancefloor-ready "Blackheart" even use their first verses twice. That the lyrics consist of phrases like "junkie love, junkie love", on opener "Your Love Is Like Petrol", or "fucked-up music sounds so fresh", on next track "Can You Feel"-- and that they're often spoken unexpressively rather than sung-- probably won't attract many new fans.

Whatever makes Client so lacking in personality isn't just the lyrics, however. When they cover Curtis Mayfield's "Make Me Believe in You", the words are still fairly rote-- "You are my temptation/ Show me inspiration"-- but the frosty Eurodisco rendition doesn't give you much reason to seek this one out instead of Amerie's faithful 2007 cover, let alone Patti Jo's Tom Moulton-remixed 1973 soul jam. (Is it better than Duffy's awfully similar neo-soul hit "Mercy", though? Maybe.) Still, the problem can't be the craftsmanship, which is consistently excellent, whether in the glam stomp of "Son of a Gun" or woozy dream-pop of "In My Mind". Chugging, midtempo tracks like "Don't Run Away" and "Ghosts", arguably the catchiest songs here, recall the slick mid-1990s electro-rock of Butch Vig's Garbage, for better and worse.

Biggest bummer of all: The timing was right for a late-career breakthrough. Client were never as glamorous as Goldfrapp, never as shrill and willing to experiment as Adult., never as shoegaze-indebted and affecting as Ladytron. But when it comes to contemporary peers like Little Boots and La Roux, Command's minimalist songwriting and high-end production don't put them far behind. It's just that, once again, Client's fondness for anonymity threatens to keep them that way. If I'm repeating past reviews here, well, does this look like great poetry?

So Cow - So Cow

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 15, 2009
Link
7.7

Nine times outta 10, "noise pop" is a misnomer. Guitars sound like crap? No discernible emotional content? Pass the bowl, maan-- that's not music for a pop audience, that's a self-esteem boost for guys who like to hit on tortured girls with Cramps tattoos in record shops. I mean, sure: Plenty of bands, from the Jesus and Mary Chain to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, really do make noise-drenched pop music. It's just that you can find plenty more bands who make noise-drenched art music, records that reaffirm their buyers' superiority over the unsophisticated rabble (often, without actually being superior). Now, don't get me wrong-- I like a lotta that stuff, too!-- but if you think your average lo-fi/shitgaze scenesters have anything to say to the broader 21st Century Breakdown-buying, "American Idol"-watching public, you've been living in Greenpoint too long. And you should sign me to your label.

"I aim to sum up something so neatly that my friend Muiris will go, 'Ah, nicely said,'" So Cow main man Brian Kelly told the blog Hi-Fi Popcorn last year. "I like the idea of someone listening and going, 'Ah, that's what I thought!" If you've ever been young and unlucky in love, the Irish multi-instrumentalist has a song that will strike exactly that kind of emotional chord. Like Television Personalities or the Clean at their most engaging, Kelly plays rickety guitar-pop that sounds homemade without feeling insular. So Cow compiles the best of Kelly's singles and self-released CDs so far, remastered by underground rock luminary Bob Weston. Sing-along hooks and scruffy charm abound.

First, though, you'll have to tear yourself away from the best few songs. "Shackleton" would be equally perfect for Death Cab fans' mixtapes, Belle and Sebastian fans' weddings, and closing-credit sequences for Chuck Palahniuk film adapations; here Kelly updates the ol' love-songs-about-love-songs trope (cf. the Divine Comedy's "Perfect Lovesong", the Lucksmiths' "Sunlight in a Jar", Elton John's "Your Song") as near-perfectly imperfect organ-and-drum-machine swoon-pop: "One day I'll write the song you require/ Until then, la la la." He turns out to be similarly adept at extended adolescence on the off-kilter "Halcyon Days", at droney bitching about his life's lack of resemblance to Hollywood romance on "Casablanca", and at tender non sequiturs on Pinkerton-style acoustic finale "To-Do List" ("a one, a two, a one to-do list..."). You might not know Korean pop star Moon Geun Young, but if you can't relate to the eponymous So Cow song's red-lining tale of an awkward breakup beneath a smiling billboard, well-- such sweet sorrow, I guess.

Kelly already has put out two full-length So Cow CDs himself, plus an EP and the occasional single, so it's hard to fault him for wanting to overload his proper debut LP. But for all the easy wit and superabundance of ideas bursting from doomed-love punk-popper "Greetings" or wobbly-synth duel "So Cow vs. the Future", So Cow would be a more cohesive listen without its few underwhelming moments-- breakup thrasher "Normalcy", maybe, or breakdown ramble "Exclamation Mark". And I know Kelly recorded a lot of these songs while living in South Korea, but his lyrics are so sharp that the couple of Korean-language tracks just don't put So Cow's best foot-- hoof? (sorry!)-- forward. Then again, the dreamier "Ping Pong Rock", which drops more band names than this review without ever losing sight of a bright melody, shows one way Kelly could get more textural without going all abstract.

Listen, nobody understands better than me the impulse to wanna set yourself apart from people who can't see the greatness of, say, Deerhoof or Kirsty MacColl, both of whom So Cow has covered. You know the old punk single "Whole Wide World" by Wreckless Eric? Whether you first heard it through John Peel or from that one Will Ferrell movie, So Cow might give you the same type of feeling-- and if you hate this music, at least you won't have to put up with being told you "don't get it." That's the art of pop.

The Curious Mystery - Rotting Slowly

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 12, 2009
Link
5.7

Oh man, I could really go for some Tex-Mex right about now. New York's mostly meh burrito situation and my still eating 'em all the time anyway aside, when you're a dutiful digital audio consumer, sometimes you've gotta run for the border. Round these parts that usually means Calexico, a Tejano-tinged indie rock group as picturesquely perfect for their fine Tucson, Ariz., as a Saguaro cactus in rosy sunset silhouette. But you can go back as far as you want: If you believe Lester Bangs, Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" begat every punk rock song ever. If you believe fellow critic Chuck Eddy, Babe Ruth's "The Mexican" begat every disco song ever. And if you believe rock, punk, disco, all that stuff exists to be contrary, to take people's expectations and give 'em a good poke in the eyeball-- to the point where it's almost not contrary to be contrary anymore-- then you shouldn't even be surprised. Of course, rock would thrive in the desert. Whadda punk.

The Curious Mystery aren't from the desert. They're from Seattle. Doesn't matter. As soon as Shana Cleveland starts in with that smoky drawl-- "If I go blind/ Hangin' out by a riverside/ Just stay with me"-- we're at the base of a rusty gorge with Cat Power on a Mazzy Star-ry night. (By the time Cleveland breaks off for an enigmatic chuckle, 10 tracks in, you're wondering whether she's really a safe person to stay with alone by a riverside on a night such as this.) Nicolas Gonzalez is a javelina-charmer on electric guitar and homemade Theremin. Add drummer Faustine B. Hudson and bass player Bradford Button, and you've got a four-piece doing unhurried psych-blues, autoharp ghost songs, and Area 51 garage-Americana, with plenty of that old frontier promise. Their debut LP might not be exactly what Kurdt Cobain used to expect from K Records-- you noticed the title's Rotting Slowly, right?-- but the Curious Mystery are well within the spirit of former Come frontwoman Thalia Zedek's unsentimental smolder. And when you get right down to it, who's the bigger outlaw: Calvin Johnson, or some schmo who can't drive just 55? Why is Sammy Hagar the one with his own brand of tequila?

Nobody ever tells the Grand Canyon to get to the damn point, and at times the Curious Mystery's slow-burning expansiveness helps set a nice acid-Western mood. Instrumentals undergo shifts both rhythmic and dynamic, showcasing Gonzalez's stormy leads, while even at Rotting Slowly's most lyrical, on vivid and forceful standout "Black Sand" or the tenderly wasted "Go Forth and Gather", the Curious Mystery are rarely far from Beach House's druggy languour. "You are the type that only moves slowly/ And I am the same," Cleveland murmurs on spindly epic "Outta California". When she isn't singing, though, these cowboy-junkie dirges tend to drift. And watch out for occasional clumsy overseriousness-- on the Gonzalez-sung "Strong Swimmers", with its Sonic Youth dissonance, two people are unlike everybody else in that they can swim, except it turns out they actually can't swim (see, a metaphor can bloom in the desert!). The Curious Mystery have the Southwestern scenery down pretty well. Now they just need to improve the accomodations for us city slickers. A guy can't live on Cabo Wabo alone. ...Or can I?

Various Artists - Kitsuné Maison 7: The Lucky One

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 12, 2009
Link
7.3

 

So Kitsuné has an iPhone app now. Some of the groups from previous Kitsuné Maison compilations have started playing live together under the tagline "Kitsuné En Vrai!" ("Kitsuné for Real!"). The influential French dance imprint has even taken to holding promotional contests: Your face could be on the next comp's crazy cover collage! As trend pieces about blogs give way to trend pieces about Twitter, the ragtag style of electronic music most memorably-- if least descriptively-- lumped together as "blog house" has become, almost literally, yesterday's news.

And Kitsuné, after seven of these things, has long since lost its element of surprise. That's sort of what happens when you help launch the careers of Bloc Party, Hot Chip, Simian Mobile Disco, Klaxons, Crystal Castles, and basically every fashionably trashy electro-punk act that isn't Justice. This is good, of course, but ascendancy can breed complacency. One way to look at last year's Kitsuné Maison 6: The Melodic One is as a victim of the series' success, largely playing it safe with glossed-up but less-great takes on the kind of banging rock-meets-dance hybrids these guys have been championing since the first half of the decade. Even so, there were still left turns (a ballad!) and blogworthy newcomers (Heartsrevolution, Ted & Francis).

Kitsuné Maison 7 is a slight but welcome improvement over its predecessor. Bright guitar pop and mellow psych-outs now go with the usual French Touch-ed electro-house thumps. The type of slow and spaced-out disco lately repopularized by Lindstrøm, Studio, and others fields its biggest Kitsuné Maison representation yet. Sure, with 19 tracks (plus a 20-second "encore" break), the album still sometimes errs toward the generically danceable instead of the truly memorable. But the best cuts easily reconfirm the label's ear for promising talent.

Not that you need Kitsuné to tell you Phoenix are fucking awesome, but a remix by L.A. duo Classixx gives Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix's "Lisztomania" a gorgeously pillowy synth-disco framework, sort of like Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe" or Friendly Fires' "Paris (Aeroplane Remix)". Also graceful is Prins Thomas' "Sneaky Edit" of London folktronica singer/songwriter James Yuill's "This Sweet Love", with its feathery acoustic guitar and house beats suggesting a cosmic disco re-edit of José González-- or Matthew Sweet. Northern Ireland's Two Door Cinema Club open the comp with breezy pop, like a bubblegum Phoenix with Vampire Weekend on chirruping lead guitar. To give you an idea how mellow this disc can be: L.A.'s Heartsrevolution, last seen making croaky basement electro-punk the Crystal Castles way, are back this time with a woozy music-box commencement lullaby (and a neat The Little Prince-inspired video).

Other choice selections include more predictable Kitsuné jams. New York blog darlings the Golden Filter stick to their Glass Candy-glazed nu-disco on "Favorite Things", which happy-birthday-Mr.-Presidents its target demo's turn-ons: "Paris, London, sweet girls, cute boys, vodka, whiskey, cameras, pictures." Nobody on Lookbook.nu listens to Coltrane? And new act Maybb, widely rumored to be an alias for big-time Eurohouse DJ/producer Benny Benassi, hits all the right Daft Punk buttons with "Touring in NY (Short Tour Edit)". Elsewhere, Manchester's Delphic flash promise on a euphoric house remix of their single "Counterpoint", all blinking synths and Underworld-echoing vocals.

Even the inessential tracks are still likely to sound good out, though they're less fun around the house. Chew Lips' "Solo" has the misfortune of sounding like Yeah Yeah Yeahs gone electro-pop in a year when Yeah Yeah Yeahs kind of went electro-pop. And you can tell the one with former Le Tigre members (Men's "Make It Reverse") by the jagged post-punk bass lines, the defiant vocals. French group Chateau Marmont's "Beagle" is space disco in the original 1980s sense, with vocoders and galloping Moroder synths; also not far from the unremembered 80s is Chromeo-plated electro-funk from Beni and "Blue Monday" gloom-marching from La Roux. Other tracks, like We Have Band's "Time After Time", sound like they're trying to do too much: Eastern European spoken-word? "We'll be alone forever," a voice repeats on Crystal Fighters' "Xtatic Truth (Xtra Loud Mix)". Nah, just until Kitsuné starts following us all on Twitter.

Miike Snow - Miike Snow

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 11, 2009
Link
5.0

Even the most dependable producers tend to stumble when they step out from behind the curtain. Timbaland's Shock Value sold more than a milli, nothing to sneeze Creatine at, but its distillation of the hip-hop heavyweight's sci-fi primitivism still sounds more like a victory lap than an actual victory. Swizz Beatz had at least one solid artist album in him, but he's no rapper, as the wait for a follow-up underscores. And N.E.R.D.? Um, you've heard those guys' other stuff, right? Pop's biggest producer-to-artist success stories, such as Kanye West, have become exceptions thanks in part to their outsize personalities.

That's where Miike Snow start to fall short. And not just because they briefly cloaked themselves in the whole "ooh we're anonymous, who could we be?" promotional trend that's been sweeping the blogs. True, you expect good things from Swedish producers Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, who as Bloodshy & Avant produced Britney Spear's indie-kid-converting 2004 single "Toxic", among other tracks for the likes of Spears, Kylie Minogue, Madonna, Rachel Stevens, and Sugababes. But Scandinavia's recent indie-pop leadership notwithstanding, "Swedish producers" doesn't exactly scream "would be interesting to hear by themselves at album-length." Enter Downtown Recordings production regular Andrew Wyatt, of anthemic New York electro-rockers Fires of Rome (and previously of Black Beetle, with Jeff Buckley cohorts Joan Wasser and Michael Tighe).

Miike Snow is about as exciting as all those biographical details would indicate. The debut album by these producers-turned-trio comes after blog-bait remixes galore, including a nice enough Postal Service-ish Vampire Weekend makeover, but there's little of those fine young Columbians' infectious exuberance here. Biggest surprise? Miike Snow largely trade in brash pop immediacy for low-key, piano-laden melancholy. Decent bummer of a first single "Burial", with its fluttery synths, tricky rhythms, and a couple of those vaguely exotic yelps currently de riguer in commercials for lime-flavored beer, is sort of like crying your eyes out to Phil Collins on a beach. Also like that, it's a bit nonsensical: "This empathy is overrated/ Like a snapshot when you've lost the game." Stop overrating those snapshots, people! The sunny West Coast harmonies of "Faker" and the oceanic calmness of "Sans Soleil" similarly suffice without quite standing out.

Miike Snow are better when they're more starlet-ready, though even then they could use an actual starlet. The thickly textured buzz-strut of "Plastic Jungle" is pretty close to Britney's "Womanizer", but instead of femme-bot purrs there's a whispery guy who wants to "get slain." Whether in the kiddie-pop lilt of opener "Animal", the Field-minding hypnotism of "In Search Of", or the glimmering electro-house thump of "Silvia" and the yearning "A Horse Is Not a Home" (no, not even in this real-estate market), the disc is rarely less than professional-grade. Faint praise, sigh.

So Miike Snow aren't half as potentially infuriating as a Kanye or a Timbaland, but they aren't half as lovable, either. More promisingly, the album's "Black & Blue" splits the difference between Prince and piano-pop, only to underwhelm as a whole. The best track, the one with the Dirty Projectors-like flickering guitars, perfect for summer driving mixes: "Song for No One". Hello, is it me you're looking for?

Axa exit sparks questions for others

News Article
Financial Times
June 7, 2009
Link

Axa Investment Managers is the most recent player to leave the exchange traded funds business, but industry experts say it probably will not be the last.

Axa IM’s withdrawal from EasyETF, its joint venture with BNP Paribas Asset Management, announced last month, comes as others are looking to increase their share of the ETF market. The reasoning behind Axa IM’s decision, however, may have a familiar ring for some existing ETF shops.

Elénore Lesueur at the firm says: “We are convinced our ability to create value for clients will be maximised by refocusing on our active management activities. Maintaining a presence in the trackers market does not correspond to our strategic priorities and would not have constituted a good allocation of our resources.”

EasyETF is the fifth biggest ETF provider in Europe, ranked by assets. As at April 30, it had $151.4bn (£93bn, €107bn) under management in 58 funds, for a 3 per cent market share, according to Barclays Global Investors.

“The impression I got was that [Axa] wanted to be a niche player [in the ETF market] concentrating on the French market and offering products on alternative markets,” says one ETF industry executive speaking on condition of anonymity. “It looks like they’ve taken the business as far as they can and it will be interesting to see the approach taken by BNP – stay niche or become broad market.”

For its part, BNPP AM is “committed” to the ETF arena, says Guillaume Dolisi, head of the EasyETF platform for BNP Paribas.

“It does not really change the overall strategy,” Mr Dolisi says of the Axa IM withdrawal. Rather than decide between niche and broad market products, EasyETF does both, according to Mr Dolisi. It provides the big benchmarks to clients but was also the first to provide access to the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, he says. Future plans include products covering agribusiness, waste management and water.

Axa IM’s decision to pull out of the ETF business was not unique, points out Scott Burns, director of ETF analysis at Morningstar. Northern Trust also recently abandoned ETFs in the US to focus on its core strengths.

“A lot of people who don’t really have a robust trading platform or index business, people who aren’t really committed to ETFs, have found that this is a nice business, but it is a bit of a distraction,” Mr Burns says. “There’s a real first-mover advantage.”

Some question how many firms have profitable ETF operations, particularly after the financial crisis.

“Keep in mind that not only are long-term assets still down 30 to 40 per cent from their highs, there are some doubts about the viability of profits from securities lending,” says Ben Poor, director at Cerulli Associates. “After Lehman, there is more concern about counterparty risk, and ethical considerations – particularly for pension funds, but also for fund houses.”

Mr Poor adds that the best buyers for iShares, BGI’s ETF business which is currently up for sale, or any other ETF operation need to have “quality distribution and existing ETF scale”. Management fees for passive products are lower than on the active side, so scale is key. Strategic Insight global consulting head Daniel Enskat divides ETF providers into three groups.

First are traditional ETF providers, index-orientated companies that have a brand based around ETFs. Second, he points to firms such as Pimco, active managers that see a strategic opportunity to use ETFs to enhance their mutual fund businesses. The third group, Mr Enskat says, consists of “companies that have jumped on the bandwagon in the last couple of years, especially in Europe, and are rethinking it now”.

He adds: “Axa is interesting because it’s probably one of the first European firms to say: ‘We looked at this, we did this, we actually established a brand, but we don’t think this is part of who we are at our core’.

“It’s probably a first mover in that direction to withdraw, and that might spur some questions for other companies in Europe as well.”